Meg Ryan and other members of the You’ve Got Mail team reminisce on everything from Ephron's unendingly sharp on-set wardrobe to her penchant for elaborate lunches.

Sometimes it seems strange that rom-coms even exist without Nora Ephron around to make them. The writer of When Harry Met Sally and writer/director of Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail helped define, for a brief and amazing period, what it meant to fall in love on-screen. Her movies were crammed with references to old movies and literature, with witty barbs for even the smallest characters, and with an unyielding belief in romance—no matter what crazy obstacles had to be overcome to get there.

In honor of Nora, who died in 2012, and of Valentine’s Day, we caught up with the cast and crew of You’ve Got Mail, her 1998 film based on the 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner. They shared everything, from her unendingly sharp on-set wardrobe to her penchant for elaborate lunches, to her deep faith in the kindness of New Yorkers. This is the story of Meg and Tom, Fox Books and The Shop Around the Corner, the Upper West Side, and love in the movies. But mostly, it’s a story about Nora.

Nora was an early Internet adopter.

Dianne Dreyer (associate producer): When e-mail first came out, I was one of the last people to go on e-mail. I said to [Nora], “This is going to change everything for the worst!” And she’s like, “You couldn't be more wrong! It's going to make everything better. To be able to quickly respond and say, ‘Hello, blah blah blah.’ ” And I said, “No, it’s going to stop people from writing. People aren't going to write letters anymore. It's really sad.” And we argued about it. Didn't argue but she was like, “Dianne, you have to grow up! You have to embrace this technology.” And she already had the giant Apple computer at her house and I was lamenting having to buy a laptop to continue to work in the motion-picture industry.

Meg Ryan (Kathleen Kelly): I got my first computer when I did that movie. I think that the company gave us a computer.

Nora made sure her remake was modern—and smart.

Delia Ephron (co-writer): That time—it's amazing to me now—but the big bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Borders, were putting all the independents out of business. So we decided to do that as the reason—he was the big bookstore, and she was the independent. And of course these two people could never be together. He was putting her out of business. And of course they'd have reason to hate each other. Real reason. And the stakes—stakes are so important in movies.

Meg Ryan: [Nora] was an essayist about culture and all that, so to her there was something secretly smart about this idea of corporate takeovers and what's happening to small business. If there was such a thing as the next You've Got Mail, we'd have to sort of say that Barnes & Noble and those sort of chains are [being] swallowed up by Amazon and now these small bookstores are coming back again . . . to re-compete!

Heather Burns (Christina Plutzker): I was young and really idealistic, and I got a little mad that she ends up with the guy who's putting her out of business. And Nora said to me, “Heather, the older you get, you're gonna realize that things change and there's not very much that you can do about it. And the city changes, and that's just the way it is.” And as I have gotten older, I realized she was right. That things change—especially in New York. It's just constantly changing, for better or for worse, both at the same time.

Nora was very specific about how the shop should look.

Delia Ephron: Once we decided that she would be an independent-bookstore owner, the reason we made it a children’s bookstore is, I think, we always tried to make movies as personal as we could. To find the thing in it that was personal. And we grew up loving children’s books more than anything.

Nora Ephron, in You’ve Got Mail’s DVD commentary: This was something that was very important to us—that there be first editions of old children's books. It's part of what make this a serious bookstore. We wanted to sell the idea that this was a place that really cared about the history of children’s literature.

Hallee Hirsh (Annabelle Fox): It was a wonderful place to be a kid in—one of the coolest, most colorful sets.

Dan Davis (production designer): [Nora] didn’t want Meg Ryan to look like she didn’t shave her armpits. We had to make it charming and old and stuff but not dowdy, right? It shouldn’t look light some old, dowdy person ran the place. So it was a fine line to keep it charming and funky and stuff without making it look like a total bag lady worked there.

Heather Burns: She actually rehearsed, which you don’t often get a chance to do in film. We worked at Books of Wonder in the children’s bookstore for a week. . . . We learned the register so we would look natural when we got in the store.

Dianne Dreyer: Watching some rehearsals — and Nora always insisted on rehearsal — it was just like a note-taking frenzy for everyone, myself included certainly for Delia and for Nora. It’s always a struggle to get the studio to pay for it because you have to have access to your actors for that much longer. Nora had her producer build it into every budget because she had to see what jokes play. What jokes play on the page are not the jokes that work necessarily in the story and between other human beings. They’re not jokes, per se. It’s situational.

Nora was very specific about everything, actually.

Dianne Dreyer: Nora as I say, all within her specific agenda, she worked really closely with designers and costumers and just cared about everything. She cared about detail in a big, big way.

Meg Ryan: Somebody had like a Yankee cap somewhere as a set decoration. And she saw it and she said something like, “This color blue doesn’t exist. It has not been invented! I said this in the production meeting I don’t know how many times and we all know this color blue has not been invented!”

“The problem with Nora is that she's right about almost everything,
all the time.”

Dan Davis: She hated blue. . . . On camera, blue generally sort of pops a lot and sometimes it looks kind of ugly and jarring for some reason.

Richard Marks (film editor): She was terribly opinionated and really believed in what she believed in and arguing was not a nasty process with Nora. You know, you stated your position, she stated her position—in my case being the editor I defer to the director—so it was never nasty. It was never confrontational. I always felt that I could say to Nora whatever it is I think.

Dan Davis: She was a bit tough at times, but I really liked it.

Dianne Dreyer: One of the reasons that a lot of people in the industry talked about her as tough, you know, is Nora was a very responsible filmmaker. When I say that, I say that with tremendous respect. If someone’s gonna give you $35 million to make a movie, you take that very seriously.

Heather Burns: She always had a crisp shirt on and directing those long hours she always looked so put together.

Dianne Dreyer: Yes, Nora believed in ironing. A lot of people don’t believe in ironing anymore, but she always believed in ironing. The problem with Nora is that she’s right about almost everything, all the time. I’m sure Delia can tell you this. It’s annoying how right she is all the time. Because she thinks in specifics. Which is what she’ll always tell you about comedy. What’s funny is what is specific.

Nora made it a love letter to New York City.

John Lindley (cinematographer): [Nora] grew up in Los Angeles, right, but she had a love and a loyalty to New York that exceeded any native New Yorker that I ever met. She lived on the Upper West Side when we made that movie, and it was a little love story to the Upper West Side. And one of the things that I remember her saying is that many people think of New York as this monolithic, intimidating place. But when you live there, you realize that what it is: a bunch of little villages. And her little village was the Upper West Side. One of the examples she always used about how un-frightening it was, was that bakeries would deliver bags of bread in the morning and leave them outside of delis and little restaurants and luncheonettes and things—and they would be there three hours later when the guy shows up to work to open the door. And, she said, “You know, everybody thinks everything here gets stolen and people are being assaulted all the time. But look, here’s this bread that nobody steals.”

Dan Davis: New York is certainly cleaned up in a lot of ways since the movie was made, but at the time there was still a lot of rough edges to New York City living here—and our thing was to not show that, to make everything look nice and beautiful and clean and charming . . . so that what we were after. But still be sort of true to the city. To make it feel real.

Dianne Dreyer: She was challenging to the A.D.s—the assistant directors—because she wanted to repeat people in the background action. Like, she wanted to recognize people on the street that you’d seen before. She didn’t want just anybody and she didn’t want them to be random. She wanted them to have a purpose and [to] walk past Meg when she’s walking to work and then walk past her when she’s going home from work, so that you would have this idea that there are people who live in the neighborhood.

Delia Ephron: If you have extras in New York, they look like they’re New Yorkers—because they are. I think that’s the tricky thing about shooting a movie in another place is that people don’t really look like they’re New Yorkers.

Nora Ephron, in You’ve Got Mail’s DVD commentary: The extra who is playing the florist [in the beginning of the film] is pregnant. We put a little pad in her tummy. And one of the things you will see later in the movie is when Meg is buying flowers at that florist, there’s a little sign in the window that says, “It’s a girl.”

John Lindley: I remember I was [filming] in [a] restaurant with Nora and suddenly there was somebody pounding on a plate glass window, screaming, and it was arresting. And then the next thing I know I can hear the guy screaming, “Nora Ephron! Nora Ephron! I thought you loved this neighborhood! Why are you fucking with us?!? Blah blah blah.” The guy is just screaming at the top of his lungs, but I couldn’t really see him. I could see a body against the window and hands pounding and this guy screaming. I just happened to be standing next to Nora, who grabbed my arm—I’m like six one and she’s like five nothing, I mean she was tiny—and she said, “What should I do?” And I said, “Just stay here. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Someone will take care of it and the guy will be placated and he’ll move along and don’t worry about it, it’s fine.” And she said, “O.K.” And 10 seconds later, she let go of my arm and walked outside to talk to the guy. And I was so struck by her fearlessness but also her integrity. She really felt like it was her neighborhood. And she didn’t know this guy. But in some ways, he was a neighbor. And she wanted to say, “Hey, look, I’m sorry if you were inconvenienced and what can I do to help you?” And meanwhile, he’s a screaming maniac.

Nora and Delia summed up the movie like this: “Can You Fall in Love with a Republican?”

Delia Ephron: Nora always thought of this movie as the sequel to Sleepless. And even though it isn’t the same characters or anything in our heads, it was always going to be for Meg and Tom. In our heads it was the sequel even though it isn’t strictly speaking “the sequel.” It was them back together and they are magic together. So some of that has to do with how rare it is when romantic comedies just have the kind of chemistry they had.

Nora Ephron, in You’ve Got Mail’s DVD commentary:Sleepless is a movie that’s about, “Is there one perfect person out there for you?” And of course we always think the perfect person for us is . . . well if you ask people to make a list of what the perfect person is for them, what they’ll essentially write down [is]: “Democrat,” “plays tennis,” “loves to watch television,” “loves old movies.” What they’re basically writing down is a description of themselves. They want to meet themselves. And that’s what we think of when we think of that one perfect person, that perfect match. But the truth is, this movie is all about, “Can you fall in love with the person who isn’t the perfect person for you?” Or as Delia and I used to say, “Can you fall in love with a Republican?”

Delia Ephron: Well first of all, when two people hate each other in a romantic comedy that just means they’re absolutely meant for each other. . . . That’s the hysterical thing. I mean I don’t know how many of us actually have married people we really didn’t get along with when we met. I think it’s actually quite the opposite! But in romantic comedies, that’s the tradition.

“She really believed love could win out—even after what she had been
through with her personal life. But she also knew what sold.”

Meg Ryan: Not combative, but when people argue in romantic comedies, it’s really about how intimate they are. They have the same rhythm of language, they have the same level of intellect, they have the same level of passion, and you just give them words—which Nora did so well.

Dianne Dreyer: She loved love, she loved love stories and she loved comedy. . . . I mean, I could be wrong about this because I didn’t know her when she was married to Carl Bernstein, but I think her marriage with Nick Pileggi just reinforced that 100 percent. They were inseparable. And they were very much in love all the time. And I think that the culmination of Julie & Julia, her final movie, is evidence of that. I mean, he came wherever she was shooting. Nora always made her life with Nick a priority, and I think once you find that kind of love in your life, it’s impossible not to transmit it through your work. And I think she did.

Betsy Sokolow-Sherman (You’ve Got Mail’s publicist): She really was a romantic in that she really believed love could win out—even after what she had been through with her personal life . . . but she also knew what sold. And she wrote, I think, really well about yearning but in a really accessible way.

Delia Ephron: When you’re already in love, the only place you ever fall in love again is in the movies. For me, I always think that idea of a chick flick is so stupid. Because what’s more important than love? I mean, isn’t it what the thing is that we all want in this world? I mean: Do we really all want to be snipers? No, that’s not one of our dreams.

Betsy Sokolow-Sherman: I think [Nora] loved working with Meg because Meg sort of embodied someone that people wanted to be around and be with and was lovable. . . . She was very attractive, smart, could be quirky, and maybe that’s how Nora did see herself.

Meg Ryan: I got a big kick out of [Nora]. She’s really fun. I mean, really fun and really smart. And I’m directing a movie right now—I’m cutting my first movie [Ithaca]—and I think about her every day. And she makes more and more sense to me every single day. I think we both have a real appreciation of a turn of a phrase, and I think we really made each other laugh. I think we have a similar sensibility and she’s somebody that I admired. It’s always fun to be around people you admire. I know it’s such a simple statement. But it’s such a gift.

John Lindley: Both [Tom Hanks] and Meg had supreme confidence in Nora. You know, she had a very clear idea always of what she wanted from the actors and she didn’t hesitate to express it. In a way that’s comforting to movie stars. They want to know that if they have a question they’re not going to fall into some abyss.

Delia Ephron: If you had a good idea on one of her movie sets, she was always interested to hear it. It didn’t matter who had the idea. It was a very egalitarian and fun set where everybody was respected and everybody was valued. So people would have ideas. I mean, whatever the actors might want to bring something, they were free to do that. We always shot the scene as written first.

Dianne Dreyer: Nora cared a lot about this in You’ve Got Mail and she cared a lot about it in Julie & Julia—she cared a lot about what young women in the workforce look like. And I think that comes as much from her and the degree to which part of her is infused in those characters as anything else. Which is that women in the workplace, they’re not overly sexy, they’re not overly kitschy, there’s a channel in which they must walk in order to be graceful and dignified and professional and work.

She made the set a $65 million dinner party.

Richard Marks: As an editor I think I’ve spent most of my life eating out of brown bags. Just ordering out from some local sandwich shop. With Nora, eating lunch was a different animal altogether. Even ordering lunch when we were buried in the cutting room—there were always specific places that Nora would want to try and eat at and places that she had tried before. And there was a production assistant whose main job in the middle of the day was to run around picking up lunch orders.

“ ‘Who are we going to have? Who's going to sit next to who?’ It
was a cultivated but casual affair.”

Heather Burns: I remember crab cakes coming around one day.

John Lindley: She always ordered food and hardly ate any of it. You would sit at a table with her and she would order tons of things because she took delight in watching other people enjoy food.

Meg Ryan: I got the feeling at the time that she approached it [directing] like she approached a dinner party. Who are we going to have? Who’s going to sit next to who? . . . It was a cultivated but casual affair.

John Lindley: We used to have an expression: “F.O.N.” We would see people on the set and we’d go, “Who’s that?” And I just remember you’d say, “Oh, F.O.N. Friends of Nora.” We sort of were wondering at one point: Who knows more people? Nora or the Pope? She just knew so many people and was comfortable in so many different circles.

Nora always wanted to get the word garnish into a movie.

Nora Ephron, in You’ve Got Mail’s DVD commentary: I said to Meg, “I think you should say that caviar is a garnish.” I’ve always tried to get the word garnish into a movie. Because I think it’s just a funny word.

Meg Ryan: I remember thinking that she liked to even direct if she came up and talked to you, as if she was going to be quoted in the New Yorker. That language, and how it’s wielded, even in the most incidental moments, was very important to her.

Dianne Dreyer: That scene where Tom’s loading up on caviar and [Meg’s] stressing, “It’s a garnish,” was very much generated by the two of them, at the buffet. And then there’s a very funny technical aspect of that scene just in terms of Nora’s specificity about everything. We shot that scene at night because the apartment had views and we wanted to use the windows in that location. And so they spread out this whole buffet and the food is beautiful and the prop people have brought it in and dressed it and presented it and laid it out. Nora looks at Jimmy Mazzola who was the prop manager and she says—she’s pointing at the avocados—and she says, “Jimmy, are these Hass?” And Jimmy goes, “Nora, they’re avocados.” He had no idea the difference between a regular avocado or a California avocado and a Hass avocado. And she said, “Did I write Hass in the screenplay?” And I said, “No, you didn’t.” And she went, “Oh, that is so sad.”

Nora Ephron, in You’ve Got Mail’s DVD commentary: This was very important to Meg, this scene, because she wanted to make clear that part of the movie was about this woman . . . finding her voice. Going from a person who really couldn’t say what she meant to say to a person who could partly because of her relationship with him online.

Nora put friends and even prop guys in roles, just to give them time on-screen.

Dianne Dreyer: One of the guys she loved [was] a young actor named Mike Badalucco—he played the elevator operator in You've Got Mail—and he was a prop guy who wanted to be an actor. And he was funny. And guess what? Nora cast him. In her mind, he wasn't Mike Badalucco the Prop Guy. It’s like, “Mike’s gonna start acting. Well, let’s see what he can do.”

Betsy Shokolow-Sherman: I was not feeling great because I was so pregnant, and in that scene at Café Lalo, when Meg and Tom were gonna meet that night, Nora asked me if I wanted to sit at a table all night. And I was like, “I don’t think I can stay up all night.” I so regret it! Because I got to be in Sleepless in Seattle. I was on top of the Empire State Building when he comes up and says, “Are you Annie?” And I got to shake my head no. Nora just would put people in different scenes in the movie and it was fun for everybody.

Nora regretted everything she cut.

Delia Ephron: Every character in it had a story in the original script and . . . it didn’t work in the cutting room, so it was cut to Tom and Meg’s story. Which happens, you know. Movies are not ultimately written documents. I mean they have to be well written, but they aren’t written documents. They’re visuals.

“Nora sent me a note saying, “I just want to let you know that only
one scene is left. But I owe you one.” And she actually did put me in
Julie & Julia. So Nora!”

Dianne Dreyer: Meg had this speech—it didn’t make the final movie, not in its entirety anyway—but Nora wrote this speech about what it’s like to go out on a boat for the day, the way people behave about their boats, that was side-splittingly funny. Like, all the polishing that goes on and all the care and maintenance of a boat juxtaposed to the actual experience, which is not that pleasant, especially if you’re not a boater. It was one of the funniest speeches I ever read.

Deborah Rush (Veronica Grant): She did something that no director had ever done. I was cut out of it largely. And Nora sent me a note saying, "I just want to let you know that only one scene is left. But I owe you one." And she actually did put me in Julie & Julia. So Nora! And no other director on the face of the earth would have ever actually come through, would have actually thought about trying to actually do that.

Dianne Dreyer: Michael Palin’s character [William Spungen, based on Thomas Pynchon] got completely cut out of the film. Not because he wasn’t funny but maybe because he was a little too weird and not enough people knew who he was. I think that the testing-preview process, even though most people hate it and I don’t think she liked it much—but she paid attention to it. And consistently tried to make the best movie that she could make. So things disappear. Sometimes because she couldn’t make them work. But other times because they just didn’t work.

Nora believed in happily ever after.

Richard Marks: [Nora] said, “I don’t know if you have heard this, but listen to this [Harry] Nilsson rendition of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow.’ ” And I had indeed never heard it, and I remember hearing it and I just sort of started to get the chills. . . . We tried the song. It seemed to have the huge emotional overtone that seemed to work with the ending.

Dianne Dreyer: There just aren’t that many smart people writing romantic comedies, for No. 1. We don’t have Billy Wilder, we don’t have Nora anymore. Male or female, who doesn’t get a kick out of When Harry Met Sally? It’s hilarious. A lot of people who write romcoms now are writing kind of the most basic, dare I say—you know, Nora’s movies, she doesn’t talk about fucking all the time, she doesn’t talk about infidelities, she sets up real situations that are worth examining and exploring on how people cope with life.

Don Lee (co-producer): Nora grew up in the business, remember, her parents were writers and producers. Nora made classic movies. She made old-fashioned movies that resonate with people. That’s why some of them have become instant classics because she made old-fashioned movies like her parents made. She grew up in that golden time of filmmaking, and she still wrote and made movies like that. They may have dismissed it, but you couldn’t argue with the results. You couldn’t argue with how happy people were.

Hallee Hirsh: If the way we send messages to each other continues to change, that movie can be remade every 10 years or so and be a completely different movie.

“He’d be having business problems. But they would be devoted. And they
would for sure have a few children, I think.”

Meg Ryan: What can I tell you! She’d be back with a vengeance! Especially since Amazon came and ate up what we thought was gonna stay dominant—these big huge bookstores. There’s like two left in New York City! Now it’s these little bookstores, you know, where you have a coffee and these little places are curated with the books and you know it’s a neighborhood place. Kathleen would be in business and Joe Fox would be out, baby!

Delia Ephron: They would still be in Manhattan and they would be like us, complaining about what’s happened to Manhattan, and he would write mail . . . not knowing what to do with Barnes & Noble. And he would be really upset and worried about money, worried about his company and how they were gonna stay relevant. He’d be having business problems. But they would be devoted. And they would for sure have a few children, I think.

Dianne Dreyer: One of the things Nora’s trying to say in the movie is that there are lots of ways to fall in love, and when you fall in love with someone, you want to fall in love with them truly. Because she loved words so much, she made it very clear that you could actually fall in love, even online to some extent, through revealing who you are by what you say and how you say it and your bravery in saying it, and saying it to that other person. Write the letter. If it tells you anything, it says: “Write the letter. Use your voice.”

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